ABSTRACT
The construct known as psychometric g is arguably the most important construct in all of psychology largely because of its ubiquitous presence in all tests of mental ability and its wide-ranging predictive validity for a great many socially significant variables, including scholastic performance and intellectual attainments, occupational status, job performance, income, law abidingness, and welfare dependency. Even such nonintellectual variables as myopia, general health, and longevity, as well as many other physical traits, are positively related to g. Of course, the causal connections in the whole nexus of the many diverse phenomena involving the g factor is highly complex. Indeed, g and its ramifications cut across the behavioral sciences-brain physiology, psychology, sociology-perhaps more than any other scientific construct.
